Chaos Magnet

Thought for the day

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.

--- Groucho Marx

Technorati Tags: Humor | Humour | Groucho Marx | GrouchoMarxr | quotes

How to check with the BBB

You know the old saying, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is"? Unfortunately, it's probably true. I've taken to checking out anybody who wants me to give them money with the Better Business Bureau. You can search by name (with or without location), phone number -- so far the most reliable key, I've found -- and website URL. Amazing how many complaints a company can rack up in a 36 month period.

A Pope is a Pope -- unless he's a domain

Checking my logs this morning, I noticed that I was getting an inordinate amount of traffic from Rogers Cadenhead's Workbench. Turns out Rogers has been getting a whole lot of traffic -- say, 100 hits every minute or so -- because he's registered BenedictXVI.com. He did it weeks ago, in fact, along with registering ClementXV.com, InnocentXIV.com, LeoXIV.com, PaulVII.com and PiusXIII.com -- successors to allt he papal names of the last 300 years.

I like Rogers. In addition to being a really smart guy, he's cool. And he's not planning to sell the name or use it for nefarious purposes, which is always nice.

(Update: Apparently Rogers was on the Today show joking that in exchange for the name, he'd take complete absolution, a trip to Rome, or maybe a mitre (the pointy hats). So I have to repost my favorite comment (of the more than 400 on his page, some of which are less than favorable).

CADENHEAD...THIS IS GOD. I HAVE A MESSAGE FOR VISITORS TO THIS WEBSITE TODAY.GET A SENSE OF HUMOR, MY CHILDREN. IT'S A WEBSITE. IF YOU THINK THAT THIS IS EVEN IN MY TOP 10 LIST OF WORRIES WITH WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD TODAY, YOU NEED TO NEED TO GET OUT OF YOUR HOUSE A LITTLE MORE.CADENHEAD...I'VE TOLD RATZINGER TO COUGH UP A HAT. LET ME KNOW IF HE DOESN'T COME THROUGH.

--- GOD

Seriously. Lighten up folks, it's not like he pointed it at porn or anything.

Actually, Rogers is Catholic, so I'm rooting for the Vatican to give him not only a trip to Rome, but an audience with the new Pope. Now THAT would be cool.)

Technorati tags: Pope | Benedict XVI | Ratzinger | Rogers Cadenhead | Religion

Digital ROTS in Florida

OK, I took a leap and called the theater where I saw AOTC, and they are showing Revenge of the Sith in digital, but the midnight show is sold out. I bought tickets for the 19th, but now, so I go and see the midnight show locally, in analog, or do I wait and see it for the first time in digital? (Update: I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and checked out TheForce.Net's list of all the digital theaters in the US.)

Yes, I'm obsessing. I know I am. I'll get over it.

Anyway, if you are in the Florida region and you want to see it in digital, you can try AMC Pleasure Island. Supposedly on their website, you can see "DP" or "DLP" after the name of the movie, but I couldn't find it. If you're interested, the following shows on the 19th are in digital, and currently have seats available: 10:30am, 2pm, 5:25pm, and 9:00pm.

I'll be in the 5:25pm audience. If you're going then, drop me a note. Maybe we can meet up!

Technorati tags: StarWars | Star Wars | ROTS | movies | personal

I've got my tickets for ROTS!

OK, I did it. I bought tickets for the midnight premiere of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Or should I say, I bought my BACKUP tickets. The tickets I bought are for the nearest theater with stadium seating. Nice theater, not too far away.

But it's not digital.

I saw Attack of the Clones in digital that first night. Had to drive 2 hours to Downtown Disney, because it was the closest theater showing it in digital, and afterwards, I found out they were showing it digitally about 45 minutes away, in Pinellas Park. But this time I can't find ANYWHERE that's showing it in digital!

This is more than just me trying to see it in the best possible quality. After AOTC, I found out that because prints have to be produced early, the digital version was actually slightly DIFFERENT from the non-digital version. (Notably, you don't see Anakin's mechanical hand in the analog version. It's there in the DVD, of course.)

So I'll be checking and checking and checking and hopefully, I'll catch them when they go on sale and find a theater SOMEWHERE in Florida that's showing it in digital and catch midnight tickets.

And if I do, somebody can have these. Otherwise... at least I'm covered.

Hitchhiker's: vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad

My mother called me yesterday to tell me that there was a move called Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I should make sure I bring my towel. My mother's well-intentioned attempt to reconnect with my childhood aside, I've seen the trailer and not only do I not intend to bring my towel, I don't intend to bring any part of my body to the theater. Reviews are unfortunately bearing out my impression of the trailer that the movie has been turned into some kind of special effects action movie, which the story clearly is not.

Well, story is a relative term. If you've read the first couple of books, you know that plot was, well, incidental. The value was the comedy. Truly funny, thoughtful, comedy. Apparently this has, in most cases, been replaced by "jokoids", a term which the reviewer attributes to Ken Campbell as "something that has the shape of a joke but is not actually funny."

Sad, really.

Technorati tags: HGTTG | Hitchhiker's | Douglas Adams | humor | humour | movies | Science fiction | comedy

Exit Mundi

Tired of post-apocalyptic stories that use the same old end-of-the-world scenarios? I mean, how many nuclear wars and biological accicents can you read about? Check out Exit Mundi, a humorous look at lots of alternatives.

Beware the Unitarian Jihad

For all those sick of fundamentalism of all sorts, check out the Unitarian Jihad. Long live the revolution!

Technorati tags: humor | humour | religion | politics | Unitarian | Unity |

TV advertising: how much?

Ever wonder how much money a television show actually makes in advertising? Check out the futon critic for a list from this past tv season. Remember, though, that the network has to pay a licence fee in order to air the show.

Technorati tags: Advertising | television | tv

Free screen grab

In my line of work, I'm constantly looking for a way to grab screenshots. I actually paid for SnagIt!, and I like it, but I lost the activation code about 35 rebuilds ago, so now I'm glad to find Screen Grab Pro, which does much of the same thing for free.

Randomly generated conference paper accepted

OK, I'm still laughing over this one. According to CNN, a group of MIT students created a program to generate a random computer science paper, and got it accepted at a conference. The paper, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification
of Access Points and Redundancy is full of statements such as:

One must understand our network configuration to grasp the genesis of our results. We ran a deployment on the NSA’s planetary-scale overlay network to disprove the mutually largescale behavior of exhaustive archetypes. First, we halved the effective optical drive space of our mobile telephones to better understand the median latency of our desktop machines.

which, if you're just skimming, sounds like a lot of the specs I've been forced to read in my life, but is all generated by SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator. The code is GPL, by the way, so you can do your own, such as A Construction of Scatter/Gather I/O, either by downloading the code or from their website. (UPDATE: Apparently they only cache the generated papers for a couple of days, so I've removed that link and instead you can read A Methodology for the Synthesis of the Producer-Consumer Problem, which I've now saved to my own server.)

Technorati tags: Rooter | pranks | computer science | MIT | SCIgen |

More programmer how-to additions

A couple of new additions to the Programmer How-To:

• Set Linux/Unix permission values
• Use a for-next loop (added PHP)

Technorati Tags: Linux | System Administration | Programming | PHP |

Somebody buy my house

I need to sell my house. I just can't do this any more. I want out. I want to have a nice little farm with horses and ducks and most of all, QUIET. But first I need to sell my house. I'm thinking I need a professional stager, like on those tv shows where they take a house that's not selling, change a few things, and put it back on the market. Yeah, that's what I need.

Definitions of an engineer

I like all three of the Definitions of an Engineer, including the original:

An engineer is someone who can take a simple idea and see through it to the bottomless pits of messy, complexity that lies underneath.

Tag Central

I've been having fun with Technorati tags, but not nearly as fun as Tag Central does.

New additions to the Programmer How-To

Apparently I've been remiss in pointing to new additions to the Programmer How-To. I've added the following items:

• Automatically reload a web page
• Mount a floppy disk in Linux/Unix
• Use an array (PHP)
• Get submitted form values (PHP)
• Create a symbolic link in Linux/Unix
• Get the current date (Python)
• Format a date (Added Python)
• Use a for-next loop (Added Python)
• Use a while loop (Added Python)
• Use an if-then statement (Added Python)
• Output to the command line (Added Python)
• Control the transparency of a window (C++ .NET)
• Importing code (Jython)

Technorati tags: Python | programming | how-to | how to | Linux

Japanese youth rediscover novels -- on their cell phones

Apparently Japanese teenages are rediscovering reading with ebooks on their cell phones.

Technorati Tag: cell phones | Japan | books | reading

DON'T TELL ME!

The onslaught has begun. The Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith merchandise is in stores, which means that if I want to make it to the movie unspoiled, I will have to be very careful in Wal*mart. When The Phantom Menace was pending, I found out that Padme was the queen masquerading as a handmaiden by carelessly reading a plastic cup. When Attack of the Clones was on its way, I knew better than to do that, but was still spoiled by a poster that showed Palpatine and Dooku with the legend "The Order of the Sith". ARG!

But this time it's worse. After averting my eyes at Wal*Mart -- though Sarah did show me Darth Tater, a Darth Vader version of Mr. Potato Head that cracked me up -- I went to a bookstore and discovered that the novelization of Revenge of the Sith is already in the stores!

You know what that means, right? That means that there are, at this moment, just hours after it hit the stores, people who have already read it and know exactly what's going to happen. GAH. I was raving about it as we left the bookstore and the clerk said, "But you already know what's going to happen."

"Sure," I said, "ultimately we all knew what was going to happen in 1977, but still..."

And then he said something that, while seemingly innoccuous, WAS A FREAKIN' SPOILER!!! Not five minutes after I saw the FREAKIN' BOOK!

Yes, I know I'm being irrational. I know I'm being obsessive. But here's the thing: I saw the first movie at the age of eight. My whole life has been a matter of waiting for the next Star Wars movie. Now there will BE no next Star Wars movie.

In some ways, I feel like my life changed in major ways with that first film, and somewhere in my head there's this nagging thought that after I see the final installment, I'm somehow going to have to grow up.

And I don't want to.

Technorati Tags: Star Wars | Revenge Of The Sith | ROTS | movies | Mr. Potato Head |

It's April Fool's Day!

I love April Fool's Day. More specifically, I love a good April Fool's Day joke. Like The Empire Strikes Back: The Lost Scene from How Stuff Works. Very funny.

PeepHenge

It was put to me this way: From the people who brought you Lord of the Peeps: the very funny PeepHenge.

Technorati Tags: Peeps | LOTR | Lord of the Rings | Tolkien | PeepHenge | Stonehenge